I’ve just heard that I’ve made the shortlist for an award for ‘Innovation in Knowledge Management’ at the Online Information Awards. The award is for the IDeA Community of Practice collaborative workspace. As with all these things, there’s a team of capable individuals involved, and my special thanks go to Andrew Milne (IDeA)for turning the vision into reality, Michael Norton (IDeA) for bringing CoP’s alive, and the people at Conseq who developed the site. Sorry if this sounds like an award acceptance speach, I realise we haven’t actually won anything yet! However, it’s good to be recognised for worthwhile achievements. The IDeA are expecting big things from their new ‘knowledge connections’ srategy for local government.
The much anticipated and long awaited Government White Paper on the future of local government is now available to download from the DCLG web site. I’ll comment once I’ve read and digested!
I got sucked into a dispute yesterday between someone who had clearly spent a lot of time and effort formulating a strategy to connect people and departments working towards formulating polices for children’s services across the local government sector. For those not familiar with how things work (or not, as the case may be) in the UK public sector, this should be recognised as a truly innovative approach – i.e., establishing an environment for peer collaboration without the constraints of geographical boundaries or politics (with a small ‘p’) – in other words a Community of Practice.
The poor chap had been struggling to get this initiative launched for some time, and had been knocked back by “the management” who were more concerned about his use of vocabulary in the supporting documents he had produced describing what a CoP was.
I wonder why, if things look fairly simple (and there’s nothing remotely complex in developing a community of practice), we insist on building processes around it until it becomes so complex that (a) only qualified ‘experts’ can do it properly, and (b) it can only be implemented if it is part of some corporate ‘grand plan’.
I offered encouragement to the chap who was struggling against this tide of bureaucracy, but regrettably I was not empowered to make a difference for him.
This reminded me of quote I read on Euan Semple’s blog recently about innovation…..
”Innovation becomes possible whenever and wherever the right combination of need and solution arises without being killed stone dead by process”.
I fear that in this instance, process has once again brutally murdered a good idea!
Reading Euen Semple’s blog today about his dislike for the term ‘Community Champions’, I make no apology for causing furher apoplexy by recommending the excellent "Guidelines for Knowledge Champions" posted by another renowed KM expert – Patrick Lambe. Well worth a read for anyone developing or implementing a KM strategy for their organisation. My apologies to Euan for my liberal sprinkling of the word "champions" throughout this blog!
Anyone interested in narrative (storytelling) techniques shoulld check out an excellent e-book entitled "The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles", available as a download from the Anecdote web site.
Further to my thoughts yesterday on tags, folksonomies and file structures, I came across a much more eloquent article today on a similar theme from Knowledge Expert – Patrick Lambe entitled "How to kill a Knowledge Environment with a Taxonomy". Well worth a read, and I’m so pleased that these issues are starting to get into main-stream discussions.
I’ve been responsible for spec’ing the recently released Community of Practice (CoP) platform for IDeA, which is being made available to all local authorities in the UK public sector. I kept functionality to a bare minimum in the interests of getting the site launched – hence bells & whistles are few and far between. However, I’m currently getting these (bells & whistles) spec’d now, but having great difficulty in convincing managers at IDeA of the merits of using community tags for creation of ‘folksonomies‘, as opposed to using a rigid file plan for places like the document library. I’m familiar with self-tagging content I produce, and finding key information using ‘tag clouds’, but I still seem to be in a minority – primarily limited to those familiar with social networking tools. Tradition dictates that there MUST be a file plan – it would appear! Then I came across David Cameron’s blog – if he can see the merits of tag clouds then I’m hoping I can convince my colleagues in IDeA (and ultimately the 2 million or so other staff working in local government) that this is the future! I didn’t coin the name ‘Dissident’ by accident!
Came across an interesting item about the relationship between communities and technology. Will be interesting to see how true all this is as we roll out the IDeA CoP platform to local authorities in the UK.
I’ve only just noticed that the assets created as part of the National Knowledge Project have been moved. This is a useful source of reference for anyone with a ‘knowledge & information’ remit. To quote from the site "ProductShare provides a single point of access to almost 1,750 products
from local government initiatives including the National Projects,
e-Innovations and regional partnerships". Couldn’t have put it better myself….!
For anyone who hasn’t come across or used Del.icio.us before in the context of Social Networking – check this article out ZDNET I wouldn’t be without it!